their regular budget committee meetings, or so they told their wives.
Rick hadn’t talked to Amanda since he’d left her house that morning, but he’d spoken to Julia on the phone. She’d been pretty closed-mouthed about her first lesson, saying nothing besides it had gone well. Now she was in the process of moving into his apartment, halfway between Amanda’s house and the club. She didn’t like the idea, even though she would have her own room, but she damn sure didn’t want to give out her real address when she came to work here. If she came to work here.
Amanda’s laughter separated from the background noise, drawing his attention her way. She was standing now, one hand on the back of baldy’s chair. Tonight the thong and bra were black-and-gold tiger stripes. Points of see-through black fabric fluttered over her middle and a length of shiny gold coiled around her upper left arm. The whole outfit was sexy, but just that bracelet wrapped around her bicep was enough to turn a man on.
She patted baldy on the shoulder, then headed toward the bar. Rick watched her, idly noting that the temperature seemed to be rising. Great for the girls in their skimpy costumes. In jeans and a T-shirt, he was liable to break out in a sweat.
Amanda stopped at the end of the bar. “Three vodka Collins, one cosmopolitan and a bottled water.”
He got the water first, sliding it across the bar to her. It was tempting to stand there and watch her drink it—twist off the plastic cap, lift the bottle to her mouth, take a drink so long and so cold that it raised goose bumps on her skin. Instead, he turned his attention to the drinks. His only qualification for this job when he’d started was that he’d drunk his share of liquor over the years. A crash course in bartending, along with a tattered copy of The Moron’s Guide to Mixology tucked under the bar, had gotten him through.
“Those men are old enough to be your grandfather,” he remarked as he poured vodka into all four glasses.
“Father, actually. I’m not that young.”
She looked way too young to be working in a place like this.
“Aren’t you ever tempted to tell them to go home to their wives?”
She held the water bottle to her throat, close enough to feel the chill but not to touch her makeup. She had the makeup application down to an art—enough to look good under the stage lights, but not so much that it looked overdone offstage.
“Their wives don’t miss them. The men have their budget committee meetings and the women have their garden club.”
“Do they ever try to buy more than drinks?” None of his business, Rick silently acknowledged. Some dancers worked the prostitution angle; plenty didn’t. When the case was over, he would put everything he’d found out in his report and if anyone on the job chose to pursue it, fine.
“Not these guys. Coming here is a little wild and risqué for them. Their lives are pretty tame.”
Rick finished off the Collinses with club soda, then added triple sec, cranberry and lime juice to the cosmo. Not these guys, she’d said, which implied that others did. He wanted to ask which ones and whether they’d been successful. “How did it go with Julia?”
“Fine. We went shopping.”
“I’m paying you to shop?”
The remark made her uneasy. Her gaze shifted away and it took a moment for her smile to form. “Great job, isn’t it?” Then she shrugged, her tiger stripes rippling. “You can’t dance without the right clothes and shoes.”
He doubted most men would agree with her. The flashy colors and see-through fabrics were nice, but they weren’t necessary. Every man he knew would be just as turned on by a woman wearing a white cotton bra and panties. In fact, Amanda, with her creamy golden skin, would look incredible in her underwear. There was something more intimate about imagining her in the lingerie she wore for herself, not for tips.
Wishing Harry would turn the AC to frigid, Rick set the last drink on her tray. “We never settled on an amount. How about one night’s house fee per lesson?”
Her eyes widened slightly. One night on the stage cost each dancer seventy-five dollars. Anything over that, they got to pocket. Some girls actually went in the hole on slow nights, but weekends always made up for it.
“All right,” she agreed. She picked up the tray and started away, then turned back. “You should have asked first. I would have settled for twenty-five, thirty bucks.” She gracefully strolled away, tray balanced on one delicate hand.
When she was out of earshot, he murmured, “You would have sold yourself cheap, darlin’.”
She was a beautiful woman. Smart. Capable. She could do anything she wanted, yet for twelve years she’d settled for this. Why?
He’d learned early in his career that asking why people did the things they did was an exercise in futility. Why did a seventeen-year-old honor student decide the profit margin versus risk in selling drugs made it a good choice? Why did a gangbanger open fire on a crowd of strangers—kids, no less—as he drove down the street?
For the most part, Rick had lost interest in the why. His focus these days was on delivering the consequences to people who broke the law.
But he couldn’t help but wonder about Amanda’s why. Why was she a stripper? Why hadn’t she pursued a more respectable career? Why wasn’t she married and raising kids? Why was she spending her nights in a place like this with people like him?
The club had about two customers too many to rank as a slow night. Rick made drinks whose recipes he could now recite in his sleep, watched the customers and talked for a minute here or there with the dancers. It was casual conversation—drink orders, a little flirting. You have any plans when you get off? Want to join me for dessert? Unless he made an effort to see the girls outside the club—too risky—he had no real chance to get information from them. It was tough to subtly say, “A margarita on the rocks, a whiskey sour and, say, do you remember a girl named Lisa who used to work here?”
That was why Julia was coming onboard. Dancers talked to each other. Hopefully, they would talk to her about Lisa Howard, Tasha Wiley and DinaBeth Jones.
Three dancers, all having appeared on the main stage at Almost Heaven, all disappeared over a three-month period pretty much without a trace until parts from Tasha’s and DinaBeth’s cars had turned up in a chop shop on the northern side of Atlanta. The chop shop happened to belong to Roosevelt Hines, who also owned Almost Heaven and its four sister clubs.
Rosey, he called himself, and no one laughed. He stood six-six, weighed three hundred pounds and didn’t give a damn about anyone but himself. He’d started with petty theft when he was ten and worked his way up the food chain. The strip clubs were the most legitimate of his businesses. He said he liked his girls, claimed he kept the bad stuff away from them.
Would Lisa, Tasha and DinaBeth agree?
“Hey, Calloway, time for a break.”
He glanced up to find Chad, bouncer and relief bartender, standing at the other end of the bar, flirting with a little blonde named Dawn. Rick had walked in on them in the storeroom his first night on the job, in the men’s room the next night. He’d seen enough to make a point of always knocking first.
There were dancers on all three stages,
